WASHINGTON — After his arrest in September, the American was held for 17 days in a dank Myanmar jail and denied food, medical treatment, sleep and the chance to speak with a U.S. government official. Even after he finally met with a representative from the U.S. Embassy, the American was transferred to solitary confinement in a cell for military dogs.
But the harsh treatment on what advocates say are trumped-up charges has barely merited a peep from the Obama administration.
Nyi Nyi Aung, a Montgomery County, Md., resident and Myanmar democracy advocate who has traveled there often, appears to be politically inconvenient for both the United States and the Myanmar military dictatorship at a moment when the two countries have taken tentative steps toward engagement after years of stormy antagonism.
"It is shocking to me that an American citizen has been treated this way and higher U.S. officials are silent on that," said Wa Wa Kyaw, Nyi Nyi's fiancee and also a U.S. citizen and Maryland resident.
"It will let the generals think, 'We can do whatever we want, even torture and inhumane treatment of a U.S. citizen,' because America wants to do the engagement policy."
In one apparent concession to American sensitivities, the government in October abruptly dropped charges of instigating unrest in concert with pro-democracy groups. Instead, it accused Nyi Nyi of purely criminal acts — allegedly possessing a forged Myanmar identification document and failing to declare U.S. currency totaling more than $2,000. His lawyers say he is innocent of both offenses; they note that he appears to have been seized by authorities before he even made it through customs, where he would have had to declare the currency.
Officials at the Myanmar Embassy in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.
Myanmar, also known as Burma, is regarded as one of the world's most oppressive nations, ruled by generals who have enriched themselves while much of the country remains desperately poor. The National League for Democracy, the party of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide electoral victory in 1990, but the military leadership refused to accept it. Since then, she has been under house arrest for most of the time, as have hundreds of her supporters.
The 40-year-old Nyi Nyi was one of the leading organizers of demonstrations against the junta in 1988 and fled the country after a violent crackdown, eventually settling in the United States as a political refugee in 1993. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002 and earned a college degree in computer science, but he also remained deeply involved in Burmese democracy efforts.
Wa Wa said that her fiance managed to often travel to Myanmar to visit his family and work with the underground because his U.S. passport is in his legal name, Kyaw Zaw Lwin. In his professional and personal lives in the United States, he has used Nyi Nyi Aung — an amalgam of a childhood nickname and his father's first name — and for years the Myanmar government never made the connection.
But last summer, Nyi Nyi's profile was raised when he helped deliver a petition to a senior United Nations official with 680,000 signatures calling for the release of all political prisoners in Myanmar.
Wa Wa, who has lived with Nyi Nyi since 2005, also has secretly traveled back to Myanmar even though she is a political refugee.
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